The worst-kept secret in the electric vehicle world is officially out. Last week, in what has so far been a rare disclosure of its finances, EV startup Slate not only revealed the extent of its backing, but the identities of its biggest financiers. And sure enough, the headliner is Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, by way of his management firm, Bezos Expeditions. Through a combination of Series A and Series B funding, Newsweek reports, the company is sitting on $700 million.
That’s a fat chunk of change, to be sure, but car companies are stunningly expensive to launch. At one point, Lordstown Motors had hundreds of millions in backing and was valued at $5 billion. Today? Not so much. Bollinger started with $150 million in backing and has been circling the drain for years, having tossed out its plans to build consumer cars years ago—even after a buyout from Mullen Automotive.
To find other EV startups with similar financial muscle, we need to move up to the big leagues. Rivian received a cash injection of similar magnitude in 2019, not long before interest from Amazon and Ford swelled its coffers. Just two years later, with inflation soaring and the EV speculation market popping off, Lucid managed to scare up nearly $2.5 billion in funding. But the world has changed a lot since then.
To the company’s credit, it’s the only EV startup with healthy funding and what appears to be a mandate to serve the mass market, not whales who have six figures to throw at what amounts to an unfinished prototype. And we have a hard time believing Slate will pull an about-face on this strategy, given that the company has no expensive alternative to pitch to early investors, and no Cybertruck or Sapphire equivalent to siphon attention away from the basic offering.
But as impressive as $700 million in early investment is, it’s still nothing compared to the staggering costs of operating a car company—especially given the rapid pace of current EV development. Perhaps the question isn’t whether Slate has enough money to build its affordable truck, but whether people will still be interested when it arrives.
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